Jerry Senner might be talking about the silver and gold mines that
used to dot the mountains in eastern Snohomish County. Or he might be
referring to the narrow-gauge logging railroads that used to lace those
mountains as they took timber to the dozens of mills in the county. Or
he could be making reference to the farms that carpeted the lowland
landscape.

Grant M. Haller / P-I

Jerry Senner, left, and Steve Rizzo, a volunteer, work on a pair
of orphan tractors from the 1940s for display in the Western
Heritage Center Interactive Museum at the Evergreen State
Fairgrounds in Monroe.

Or maybe he's talking about them all when he says, "Nobody
remembers."

What nobody remembers is where milk came from before it came from the
grocery store, that wood was in some other form before it wound up as
furniture at Ikea, and that minerals and gems weren't manufactured in
the jewelry store.

Senner would like to see that people do remember, even as
urbanization and technology continue to push those most basic of
industries out of Western Washington, to across the mountains, to other
states or into the history books.

Senner is the driving force behind the Western Heritage Center
Interactive Museum, which got a public preview during the Evergreen
State Fair in Monroe. He hopes to have the museum permanently up and
running in its remodeled and expanded building at a corner of the
fairgrounds by Thanksgiving. Senner, who grew up on a dairy farm in
Monroe and later ran one near Elma with his wife, now does construction
and excavation work in Snohomish County.

The goal of the museum is to preserve and tell the history of four
basic industries -- mining, logging, farming and transportation
(primarily water and narrow-gauge logging railroads).

Those four are well-chosen. There are still operating sawmills in
Western Washington, although timber generally now reaches what mills
remain by truck. Little remains of mining beyond the occasional
sand-and-gravel operation.

Grant M. Haller / P-I

A
pile of wrenches waits for wall space at the Western Heritage
Center Interactive Museum at the Evergreen State Fairgrounds in
Monroe.

Farming is still holding on -- sort of. Both King and Snohomish
counties had their peak years for number of farms in 1945 -- King at
nearly 6,500, Snohomish at about 6,260. Even as of 1954, King County
ranked second only to Yakima County for the number of farms.

But the decline was on. By 2002 (the most recent farm census data
available), the number of farms in Snohomish County was down to 1,574,
and that was down 13 percent from five years before. King County had
just 1,548, down 15 percent in a five-year span. And if you're surprised
that the number is that high, remember that these are small operations;
the average farm size was 27 acres in King County, 44 in Snohomish. (The
2002 average for Yakima County was 450 acres; over in wheat country,
Whitman County's average was 1,222 acres.)

With that sort of evaporating presence in population centers, it's
not surprising that the museum's display (which Senner says represents a
fraction of the artifacts he has collected) set up at the fair drew a
lot of curious visitors armed with a host of "What's that?" type
questions -- even at an agriculture-intense gathering such as the
Evergreen State Fair.

Senner hopes to answer those questions through displays, preferably
ones that move (his hope is to link computers to machines, so that
visitors can read what the device does, then touch a screen to see it in
operation). It's a trick he learned from his experience with an
antique-tractor club he helped found in the early 1980s and years of
displaying them.

"A static display doesn't really cut it," he says. "People walk by
and say, 'That's nice.' If I started it up, you'd have 100 people then."
A simulated mine shaft is also planned for the museum.

The collected tractors and tools are more than opportunities for
education and exercises in nostalgia. They're also a testament to the
ingenuity of those early farmers, loggers and miners. At the fair,
Senner rigged up a drill press that operated not on electricity but from
a belt connected to the drive shaft of an idling tractor.

But to answer the questions of the curious, the museum first has to
preserve the artifacts of those early basic industries, which Senner
hopes to do with the museum. "A lot of this old equipment is rotting to
the ground," he says.

It's not just the physical equipment that's being preserved, but the
stories and lives that go with them. "Every time one of these old-timers
pass away, they take a whole library with them," Senner says.

There's even an important philosophical principle being preserved and
advanced here, one too broad to be encompassed even in something as
lofty as a mission statement.

The Western Heritage Center says it will "celebrate the benefits of
the Industrial Revolution, honoring the rural technologies which shaped
and continue to shape life in the communities of these valleys."

A lot of people are being asked to make decisions about industries
that they have little awareness of, much less any direct contact or
experience with.

Debating the future of those industries, and the course of the next
Industrial Revolution, is tough without knowing that there was a first
Industrial Revolution, what it produced for us, what it took to produce
that revolution -- and who did the actual producing.